Dutch filmmaker Jan Teunissen (1898-1975) was a disarming figure, a plump, cheerful movie lover who would do anything to further his own career in cinema. In the Nazi era, he was called the “czar” of the Dutch film industry. He boasts about being personal friends with Goebbels.
Somehow, though, he and other Dutch fascist filmmaker colleagues who collaborated with the Third Reich never faced the reckoning you would have imagined for associating so closely with Hitler. Teunissen served some time in prison, but several of these filmmakers went on to have successful careers and they were very careful to scrub out any mention of their chequered Nazi pasts.
Luuk Bouwman tells the extraordinary story of Teunissen in his new feature doc The Propagandist (sold by Film Harbour and premiering in International Competition at IDFA).
Teunissen wasn’t given to introspection or regret. He was an eminently practical man. Born into a wealthy background (his father was a successful antiques dealer), he started making home movies at an early age. In the 1930s, he directed the historical epic William of Orange (1934), notable as the first Dutch feature sound movie, but it was very badly received. During the war, the Dutch animated feature Reynard The Fox, ground-breaking in its techniques but also virulently anti-Semitic, was made in a studio in Teunissen’s backyard.
“The Propagandist came out of All Against All,” Bouwman explains how the new film is a natural follow up to his 2019 project, which also played at IDFA and which looked at the history of fascism in the Netherlands. During the research for the earlier documentary, Bouwman first came across the seven-hour interview with Teunissen conducted by historian Rolf Schuursma in the mid 1960s. (The interview forms the backbone of the new documentary).
Schuursma is still around today – and has reached the ripe old age of 93. “He is still very lucid,” the director says of him.
Another important figure in uncovering the Teunissen story was the remarkable Egbert Barten, a historian who has researched extensively the Dutch film industry of the 1940s and runs his own film museum.
The Propagandist makes it clear that Teunissen was expert at getting his message across. The same techniques he used in the 1940s were later adopted in post-war marketing and advertising movies. He understood human psychology and knew how to push buttons.
“When I was working on All Against All, the subject of propaganda was one of the most interesting things for me. I wanted to go deeper into that…”
What does Bouwman make of Teunissen? Is he the embodiment of evil or a passionate cinephile who somehow lost his moral bearings along the way?
“It feels to me that he wanted to be an important figure,” Bouwman reflects on what drove his subject. “You can see elsewhere too that people with this huge amount of ambition, when their artistic ambitions are frustrated they pursue political careers.”
The director was also struck by Teunissen’s “coldness.” In the interviews, he didn’t show any remorse for the suffering perpetrated by the Nazi regime. “He is charismatic but he is also really detached from reality.”
Teunissen didn’t seem, at first, to be driven by Nazi ideology. In the 1930s, he made a film called Friday, Night or Sabbath, set in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. As the documentary informs us, this film screened for many weeks in the Tuschinski and was much admired by Jewish audiences, some of whom said they returned to the faith after seeing it. But a few years later the same filmmaker lent his images of the Jewish quarter to the deeply racist propaganda film The Eternal Jew.
He was a careerist who somehow never stopped to think about his moral responsibility. His loyalty to the Nazis cost him dearly. His son and stepson were both killed fighting for the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front. His kids, though, shared his fervent support for the Third Reich. “In the end, he doesn’t take responsibility for it as a parent. In the interviews, he describes it as if he is on the moon, looking back on earth,” Bouwman says of Teunissen’s attitude toward his own life.
The Dutch cineaste was a skilful editor. In the interviews after the war, he often gave the impression he regarded his own experiences as if they were movie rushes – raw material that he could cut and discard as he saw fit, presenting himself in the best possible light.
One benefit of Teunissen’s obsession with cinema is that he left a huge archive behind him. There were home movies shot on 16mm and 35mm, footage of him meeting with prominent Nazis like Himmler, and plenty of feature and promotional films which he either directed, edited or oversaw. Then there were the cassettes of the interviews that Teunissen had later given.
“It is part of an origin story of Dutch cinema and it has largely been forgotten because the films were never shown again or were thrown away,” the director says of his subject’s dubious part in Dutch national film history. Teunissen was a pioneer – but that doesn’t mean anyone will be in a particular rush to re-evaluate his contribution, such is his unsavoury reputation. Bouwman also believes he was “bragging” and made his role in Dutch movie history appear “bigger than objectively it was.”
Nonetheless, the fact that the documentary makers turned up so much information about him suggests that he was a significant player as a propagandist for the Nazis, the director stresses.
“The film has its length but we found so much more than were able to put into the final edit,” Bouwman says of the huge amount of material that he and his researchers turned up. “We were really [able] to find a lot of things! With archives becoming better and better at re-digitising formats, we were able to link pieces together that maybe 10 years ago would have been really difficult [to connect]. If you only have an analogue archive, it is much more difficult to find stuff.”
The Propagandist is produced by Docmakers and is being released in the Netherlands by Cinema Delicatessen. Human is the broadcaster.
This film is in a very different register to another of Bouwman’s previous docs, Gerlach (2023), co-directed with Aliona van der Horst and about a very likeable Dutch arable farmer, tending his land and the modern world encroaches around him. It is also a long way removed from his new project The Eighth Continent, which he is co-directing with Tomas Kaan. This is a big budget endeavour looking at the space race and plans to colonise the moon.
“For me, with every film, you start with a blank page…to switch in form and invent something new for the next film is something I really enjoy! Gerlach is completely different. It is more about good in people and this one [The Propagandist] is more about evil…” Bouwman ends.
This is an extended version of an article that ran in See NL, published by Eye Filmmuseum and the Netherlands Film Fund.
